Crossword-Solution: BAPTISTERY 10 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; his famous masterpiece, the eastern doors of the Florentine Baptistery, of San Giovanni, of which Michael Angelo said that they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise.

Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral, Baptistery, and Campanile—ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in marble and red stone—are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose.

The altar itself, a name which insensibly became familiar to Christian ears, was placed in the eastern recess, artificially built in the form of a demi-cylinder; and this sanctuary communicated by several doors with the sacristy, the vestry, the baptistery, and the contiguous buildings, subservient either to the pomp of worship, or the private use of the ecclesiastical ministers.

But, in spite of this faith in love which fired his blood, and which of old inspired the painters of Spain, which gave Italy her Madonnas, created Michael Angelo’s statues and Ghilberti’s doors of the Baptistery,--desire had him in its toils, and agitated him without infusing into his heart that warm, ethereal glow which he felt at a look or a word from the Duchess.

But what if Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those years he spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius’ tomb, and again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare pedestals for his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we to regret them quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to think him an impossible person to deal with.